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While ballet fans will be out in force to welcome Brendan Saye’s scheduled return to Romeo at the March 19 matinee, there’s a pair of role debuts the following afternoon that are generating equal interest.

Principal dancers Svetlana Lunkina and Evan McKie have been stage partners several times before but not in such emotionally charged and physically challenging roles as Romeo and Juliet.

Lunkina, a former Bolshoi Ballet star, danced excerpts of the iconic Leonid Lavrovsky version in Russia, but her March 20 debut in Alexei Ratmansky’s Romeo and Juliet, commissioned for the National Ballet in 2011, will be her first full assault on one of the most coveted roles in the ballerina repertoire.

Lunkina comes to it with notable advantages. Apart from having danced virtually all the other major full-length dramatic ballets, she’s familiar with Ratmansky’s choreographic approach. He was Lunkina’s artistic director at the Bolshoi from 2004 to 2008.

“It helps me understand Alexei’s vision for the ballet,” says Lunkina. “The choreography is really difficult and there’s a lot of it, but it’s such a deep, emotional story. Everything should seem so natural; every step, every gesture, every moment of eye contact. Dancing Juliet is like taking on a life. You just have to go for it.”

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Toronto-born McKie is no stranger to Romeo and Juliet. In his former days with Germany’s Stuttgart Ballet, he danced the male lead in the celebrated John Cranko production. With the National Ballet, McKie made a powerful debut last November as Tybalt in Ratmansky’s staging of the Prokofiev classic.

“Dancing Tybalt was a great way to get to know the production,” says McKie.

“I loved Cranko’s version. It was one of the earliest. Alexei’s is almost modern. It’s contemporary in the movement, the way the dancing really never stops. It requires emotional and physical stamina. And there’s a spiritual quality to Alexei’s work. You feel the way Romeo is really searching for something. I clicked with that yearning side immediately.”

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